A major complaint about Google's Chrome web browser has been that so far, it is still not available on anything other than Windows. Google promised to deliver Chrome to Mac OS X and Linux as well, but as it turns out, this is a little harder than they anticipated, Ben Goodger, Google's Chrome interface lead, has explained in an email. It has also been revealed what toolkit the Linux version of Chrome will use: Gtk+.

Make a Linux version of your software - receive flak from the community for not picking the toolkit du jour.

Well, they certainly haven't picked the right one if they really want to make Chrome cross-platform and make it work, so I wish them luck. Firefox certainly hasn't worked in that direction so they haven't learned any lessons.

Mind you, there's an even bigger obstacle for Google than the toolkit - getting the damn application distributed to users and installed in the first place! :-) Linux is a whole world of hurt on that front.

Not exactly. Distributing commercial/precompiled applications is a pretty awful experience on Linux.

But if Google include the GTK interface in Chromium, then they will not have to even lift a finger to get it distributed to all the major distributions. There are many people out there seriously interested in getting Chrome[ium] to work on linux, and there will be no shortage of people willing to create and deliver packages once it has been released